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VEN during its heyday the ru tradition was never much practiced outside educated circles, although the ru teachings of respect for elders and education were widely disseminated at the popular level through proverbs, folk tales, and instructions for weddings and other ceremonies. When the Chinese government abolished the old civil-service examinations in 1905 and began to Westernize the education system, the ru class became obsolete, and anything resembling institutionalized Confucianism disappeared. The Nationalist revolutionaries who overthrew the imperial government in 1912 went further, equating Confucius with despotism and technological backwardness; and both Mao Zedong's ascendancy, in 1949, and his Cultural Revolution, in 1966-1976, included a methodical attack on all remnants of classical Chinese civilization. However, as early as the 1930s, when Mao was consolidating his Red Army in northern China, some non-Marxist academics and even Nationalist politicians began to take an interest in Confucius, hoping to find a "third way" that was neither Communist nor derivative of Western thought. They were the first New Confucians, and their aim was to recast Confucius' teachings as being fully compatible with modern technological training and liberal democracy, using the Confucian reverence for learning and the Confucian emphasis on merit rather than birth. After Mao came to power, a second generation of New Confucians fled to university positions in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Some of their students eventually emigrated to the United States and became professors themselves.

The best known of the North American New Confucians is Tu Wei-ming, a professor
of Chinese history and philosophy at Harvard and the director of the
prestigious Harvard-Yenching Institute. The mainland-born, Taiwan-educated Tu
has made it his mission to re-Confucianize East Asia and to promulgate
Confucianism as a universal religion perfectly suited to Asian modernity. Tu
works in the tradition of Zhu Xi, a twelfth-century ru scholar who was
heavily influenced by Buddhism. Zhu developed Kongzi's teachings into a
full-blown metaphysical system based on the cultivation of harmony between
oneself and the cosmos. This system was much more like a religion than the
earlier Confucian tradition had been, and it became imperial orthodoxy and
later spread to Korea and Japan. "Confucianism so conceived is a way of life
which demands an existential commitment on the part of Confucians no less
intensive and comprehensive than that demanded of the followers of other
spiritual traditions such as Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, or
Hinduism," Tu wrote in 1976.

Tu's campaign has made some inroads. During the 1980s Lee Kuan Yew, then
Singapore's Prime Minister, invited Tu and others to help set up a high school
curriculum that included Confucian principles (the project fizzled amid
vigorous protests from Singapore's non-Chinese population). And post-Mao China
has begun to reappropriate Confucius, hosting symposia in Beijing every five
years to celebrate his birth. In the main, however, the university-based New
Confucians -- a new ru class, so to speak -- are theologians without a
flock. Even on Taiwan, where religious observance is prevalent and where a man
who claims to be Confucius' seventy-eighth lineal descendant lives, few
residents identify their spiritual beliefs with the teachings of Master Kong.
"Confucian values are very pervasive among the Chinese, but they're so
diffuse that people don't recognize them as Confucian," Hoyt Tillman, a
professor of Chinese cultural history at Arizona State University, explains.
"They just say, 'That's the way we Chinese do it.'"

The upstart theories of the Brookses and Jensen only make the New Confucians'
re-Confucianizing project more problematic -- for reasons that go beyond what
they say about Confucius himself. The Brookses argue that the ru
tradition, and even Chinese literary civilization, are not nearly so ancient
and time-honored as is often maintained. And Jensen contends that New
Confucianism is itself a largely Western product. At the turn of the century,
he says, two Chinese intellectuals who were widely read in Western ideas
grafted some of them onto the Chinese image of Kongzi and his legacy. Zhang
Binglin used the cultural-evolutionary theories of Weber and Herbert Spencer to
recast Kongzi as a secular quasi-modern, China's first rationalizer of a
superstitious indigenous tradition; Hu Shi, who had converted briefly to
Christianity, interpreted him as a revolutionary like Jesus who had taken a
stand against hidebound religious authority. Jensen believes that the New
Confucians are following Zhang and Hu's lead in viewing the ru tradition
through the lenses of Western progressivism.

As might be expected, such views are vastly irritating to the New Confucians
and other admirers of Chinese tradition. "I think that Lionel Jensen wants to
be a little outrageous," says Tu, who was among Jensen's teachers. Wm. Theodore
de Bary, a Sinologist at Columbia University who has written prolifically and
sympathetically on Zhu Xi and his followers, says, "Confucianism is based on
the study of Confucian texts, and the historical development of Confucianism
doesn't depend on the theories of the Jesuits or other Western writers. That
mistake was precisely what I wanted to avoid when I started studying the texts,
back in the 1940s. So I started reading what the Chinese -- not Westerners -- said about Confucianism."

If it turns out that Confucius never existed, or that the Analects was
composed over several centuries, the faith of many New Confucians is likely to
be rattled a bit but not destroyed. As they like to remind their listeners,
most of them have invested not in a long-dead historical figure but in a
tradition that is still alive, and in a haunting body of literature that
remains susceptible of holistic reading and continues to reveal, whatever the
identities and intentions of its authors, a vivid portrait of an arresting man.
"It's like Christianity -- Christianity isn't monolithic, and it has changed over the centuries to accommodate changes in society," Robert Neville, the dean of Boston University's school of theology, says. As Neville, a United Methodist
minister and a Confucian who meets regularly with Tu and other academics in a
group called the Boston Confucians, puts it, "The authority doesn't rest with
the person but with the teaching."

Still, among younger Chinese-born scholars who have no ideological stake in
Confucianism as a counterweight to Maoism, efforts like those of Jensen and the
Brookses to place the reputed sage in the historical context of the culture
that produced him come as a relief. "There's a myth about Chinese culture -- that it's different from Western culture in its static nature and durability," says Aihe Wang, an assistant professor of ancient Chinese history at Purdue
University. "It's a kind of Orientalist myth. Anything that contributes to
demythifying this point of view is very healthy."